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No. 212 Rome Street, in Newark, New Jersey, used to be the address of Grammer, Dempsey & Hudson, a steel-supply company. It was like a lumberyard for steel, which it bought in bulk from distant mills and distributed in smaller amounts, mostly to customers within a hundred-mile radius of Newark. It sold off its assets in 2008 and later shut …

I should start by saying that the headline isn’t exactly clickbait, because who writes clickbait on Boxing Day anyhow, but it does oversell what I’m about to write, which is not a Grand Unified Theory mutually contextualizing all three topics — perhaps another time — but a consideration of each topic, in linear order. That is, first I’ll consider “The …

Why the current cultural fetish for zombies? In 2014’s Hooked, Nir Eyal ventures a guess: “Perhaps technology’s unstoppable progress—ever more pervasive and persuasive—has grabbed us in a fearful malaise at the thought of being involuntarily controlled.” We worry that we’ve become slaves to a tech-induced malady, argues Eyal, so we can relate to those ailing automatons on screen. Eyal may have a point. A recent study showed …